A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.
Selleck and Thompson recount a 1990s Canadian labor dispute that precipitated violence, sabotage, and the startling deaths of nine gold miners in this nonfiction work.
The trouble started when Royal Oak Mines took control of various gold mines in Canada. One of those was called Giant, located in the mining town of Yellowknife, where Royal Oak CEO Margaret “Peggy” Witte implemented “vigilant supervision” over the employees. This didn’t sit well with Giant’s union, the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers, especially as Royal Oak essentially dismissed the union’s grievances that had piled up during the mine’s ownership transfer. When the collective agreement expired in March 1992, a strike was inevitable. Negotiations only led to bad blood between the company and the union, and Royal Oak brought in contract workers, or “strikebreakers.” Violent incidents ensued, including a riot, mine break-ins, and the sabotage of equipment. In September of that same year, an explosion took the lives of nine men working in the mine. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were already policing the labor disputes, suspected the explosion was intentional and searched for a saboteur as the unforgiving strike continued. Selleck and Thompson, who first wrote about this dispute as journalists for local publications, here deliver a scrupulously researched narrative packed with detail. Concise, journalistic prose effortlessly moves readers through a variety of interviews, from union members and strikebreakers to Royal Oak staff and RCMP officers. The narrative covers the months leading up to the strike and the murders, as well as the long-running stalemate between the company and CASAW, followed by years of fallout. The authors include background on the man who ultimately confessed to the murders and cover the interrogation that led to his confession and his eventual trial. Selleck and Thompson further bolster their account with a bevy of high-quality photos of relevant sites and people and provide a welcome focus on each of the nine victims.
A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781038306241
Page Count: 462
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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